Agree to disagree then. I highly doubt they’re suing over the capture mechanic. If they ever had a patent for that, it would have expired already.

the mechanic is capturing a creature by weakening them and throwing a ball at them. Not just throwing a ball.

And like I’ve said before, Shin Megami Tensei did this before Pokemon. This concept was not original to Pokemon, and exists in several other creature catcher games.

None of the creatures I’ve seen are entirely new designs, but rather hybrids of existing, well known Pokemon.

Then you haven’t seen a large portion of Pals. Plenty of pals are unique. Some of them look similar to Pokemon, sure, because they’re based on the same real world animal.

outright lying to defend them and ignoring obvious facts does

🙄🙄🙄

It’s fine to admit that a thing you like has flaws, and admit that those flaws need addressing.

K, Palworld has flaws. Never claimed otherwise.

We’ve run far field of the point though. Palworld is being sued for patent infringement. If there was ever a patent on the “weaken creature then capture” mechanic, it’s long expired, so they’re not being sued over that. They’re not being sued over art or Pal designs, because that would be copyright infringement, not a patent violation.

Given those facts, what do you think Palworld is being sued for?

but not capturing by weakening the creature and throwing a ball at them.

If you think “throwing a ball” is a patentable (or even copyrightable) mechanic, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Palworld explicitly copies the style of creature design from Pokemon

Some pals are similar to Pokemon, sure, but a lot are quite distinct. If you have a problem with that though, take it up with The Pokemon Company, because they did it first.

The developers knew exactly what they were doing, so to claim it wasn’t intentional is disingenuous at best.

Of course it was intentional to make a game in the same genre as Pokemon, with similar mechanics. That’s how video games in the same genre work. You make them similar to things you know people like, so that there’s a greater chance they’ll like your game too, but you also introduce new, unique things so that you’re not copying. Yes, Palworld did that intentionally.

None of that is illegal though, or shouldn’t be anyways, unless they’re straight up stealing assets/code from a Pokemon game and using it in Palworld.

K first of all, the mechanic you’re referencing was already an established mechanic before Pokemon Red/Blue came out. The Pokemon Company didn’t invent the “creature catcher” genre of video games.

Second of all, as I’ve said already, the catching mechanic in Palworld is absolutely distinct enough to be considered as drawing inspiration from Pokemon, and not copying. If you wanna get into the nitty gritty, I’ll meet you down there, but if you’re just gonna continue to spout meaningless contrarianisms I’ve got better things to do

Third of all, “cell shaded anime art style” describes hundreds if not thousands of video games, not just Pokemon games. You can’t realistically claim that Palworld copied Pokemon’s art style* just because it uses a cell-shaded anime style, especially because Pokemon has only used that art direction for the last two generations of games, and the style has been in use long before sword and shield came out.

Copying would imply a one to one duplication. The catching system in Palworld differs in multiple ways from the Pokemon system. I think that’s enough to call it borrowing and not copying.

Palworld is an open world survival crafting factory/base building game, that happens to borrow the catching mechanic from Pokemon (who borrowed it from Shin Megami Tensei).

Yes, but at 45 mph it starts playing the sound from Scooby Doo when Shaggy and Scooby start running away from the bad guy

If it can also give reach arounds, consider my interest piqued

Either that or they show up right as you sit down to take a shit, or while you’re in the middle of your shower

Yeah playing quickplay in Overwatch has all the sweaty counterswapping and flaming for off meta picks as competitive, except with a 5-10 minute queue time instead of 20-30

This is me. Software developer by day, endless diyer and hobby starter by night (at least on nights when I’m not dissociating on the couch)

You can mod things on Linux, it’s just slightly more of a pain because you have to usually manually place files in the right locations, since the mod managers are kinda hit or miss on Linux.

That being said, I was recently able to mod Minecraft and Valheim pretty extensively with mod managers (I forget which one for Minecraft, but I used r2modman for Valheim which worked great), and I got the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition mod manager working enough via wine that I could mod that too.

This is like half the cast of Ouran High School Host Club

But a few devs who know how to spin up a thing with auto-scaling can accomplish a lot

This is true, but I still find it impressive that Valve has seemingly managed to find 80 all in one spot. My company can barely find one or two

It doesn’t exist until they release the butthole cut

✌️👉👍

Compiling to bash seems awesome

See, i disagree because

I don’t think anyone other than the person who wrote it in amber will run a bash file that looks like machine-generated gibberish on their machine.

Lol I barely want to run (or read) human generated bash, machine generated bash sounds like a new fresh hell that I don’t wanna touch with a ten foot pole.

False dichotomy. There is also the possibility that you realize, from experience, that when you start introducing users, unexpected shit happens.

If you’re not willing to let the unexpected shit be public, don’t do a public alpha test. That’s the point everyone here is trying to make. Like, what are these streamers and content creators supposed to do when they run into a game-breaking bug, or they run into some mechanic they really dislike? Ignore it and hope no one notices, for fear of saying something “disparaging” about the game? Do you not see how unreasonable that is? We all understand that alphas are incomplete and will have bugs, and unexpected shit will happen. We all also have different opinions about what we like in video games. Them trying to hide from that, rather than just being upfront about it (like every other alpha or early access game I’ve ever played) is asinine.

They could do the alpha testing completely internally

They should do the alpha testing internally, if they’re not willing to have their product be honestly reviewed, or pay to have their product advertised.

But I get why the company would do this and it’s really a complete non-issue.

Considering that this thread exists, Seagull’s original tweet got the immense attention it did, and the studio announced hours ago that the particular clause everyone (except you) is taking issue with was a mistake that they’re looking into fixing, uh, maybe it actually isn’t just a “non-issue”?

Sure, they could do an NDA, or they could also get free publicity. It’s reasonable for them to choose the latter, and if you don’t like it, it’s reasonable for you to wait for release.

No, actually, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect “free publicity” on the condition that the ones providing that publicity muzzle themselves if they don’t like the game. That’s exploitative behavior by this studio. Expecting free anything and then attaching unreasonable legal stipulations that you know the other party cannot fight is unethical.

Yeah, that’s pretty clearly not the point. They presumably want to fix the bugs without them counting against them in the court of public opinion.

They want to control the narrative around their unfinished video game, by trying to legally bully content creators, who have way less legal and financial leverage, into doing their bidding. That is unethical. Full stop, no I will not be taking any more questions.

If the product is unfinished, why is it being released to the public, in any capacity?

If they want to playtest and find bugs in their unfinished product, they should do that. By paying a QA team and playtesters, not by trying to dupe streamers into generating free advertisement.

If your alpha is trash, then:

1. Your game isn’t actually ready for alpha
2. Make people sign an NDA to playtest it, don’t release a “public closed beta” contingent on this non disparagement agreement bullshit

Most people (except for you, apparently) can see right through this kind of thing. The only reason you’d make someone sign a legally binding document saying “you’re not allowed to say bad things” is because you know there are bad things to say. If there are bad things to say and you know about them, the correct move (from both a technical and PR perspective) is to fix the bad things before allowing your game to be played publicly. Preventing people from talking about the bad things won’t magically get rid of the bad things.